The Madness That Brought the Word among Us

And now let us go on to explain why this mighty Word of God came down to live among men. Our ignorant and foolish race could not grasp the one who is Lord of heaven and earth: who proceeds from the divine being of his Father as from the supreme fountain, who is present always and throughout the world, and who shows by the clearest proofs his providential care for the interests of humankind. So they gave the worshipful title of God to the sun and moon, to the heaven and the stars of heaven. Nor did they stop there. They made gods of the earth itself, of what it produces, and of the various substances that keep animal life going, and they made images of Ceres, of Proserpine, of Bacchus, and of many others like them. [a] They did not even shrink from giving the name of gods to the very ideas of their own minds, and to the speech in which those ideas are expressed. They called the mind itself Minerva and speech Mercury, and they fixed the names of Mnemosyne and the Muses to the faculties by which knowledge is gained. Even this was not enough. Racing still faster along the course of impiety and folly, they made gods of their own evil passions, which they ought to have regarded with disgust or held in check by the principles of self-control. Their very lust and passion, the unclean disease of their souls, the members of the body that tempt to obscenity, and even the very lack of self-control in shameful pleasure, they described under the names of Cupid, Priapus, Venus and others of the same kind. [b]

Nor did they stop even there. They dragged their thoughts of God down to this bodily and mortal life and made gods of their fellow men. They gave the names of gods and heroes to men who had met the common lot of all, and they imagined, in their folly, that the divine and imperishable Being could haunt the tombs and monuments of the dead. More than this, they paid divine honors to animals of every kind, and to the most harmful reptiles. They cut down trees and quarried rocks. They got themselves bronze and iron and other metals, and from them they fashioned likenesses of the male and female human form, of beasts and of creeping things; and these they made the objects of their worship. Nor was this enough. They gave the same divine honors to the evil spirits themselves, which lurked inside their statues or lay hidden in secret, dark corners, eager to drink their libations and to breathe in the smell of their sacrifices. Further, they tried to win the close help of these spirits, and of the unseen powers that move through the regions of the air, by charms of forbidden magic and by the compelling force of unholy songs and incantations. Again, different nations have taken different persons as the objects of their worship. The Greeks have given the titles of gods and heroes to Bacchus, Hercules, Asclepius, Apollo and others who were mortal men. The Egyptians have made gods of Horus and Isis, Osiris, and other mortals like them. And so those who boast of the wonderful skill by which they discovered geometry, astronomy and the science of number, wise as they are in their own conceit, do not know or understand how to judge the measure of God’s power, or to reckon how far his greatness rises above the nature of irrational and mortal beings. That is why they did not shrink from giving the name of gods to the most hideous of the brute creation, to venomous reptiles and savage beasts. The Phoenicians made gods of Melcatharus, Usorus and others, mere mortals with little claim to honor; the Arabians, of Dusaris and Obodas; the Getae, of Zamolxis; the Cilicians, of Mopsus; and the Thebans, of Amphiaraus. In short, each nation has taken up its own special gods, who differed in no way from their fellow mortals, being simply and truly men. Again, the Egyptians with one consent, the Phoenicians, the Greeks, indeed every nation under the sun, have joined in worshiping the very parts and elements of the world, and even the produce of the ground itself. And, most surprising of all, though they admit the adulterous, unnatural and licentious crimes of their gods, they have not only filled every city and village and district with temples, shrines and statues in their honor, but have also followed their evil example, to the ruin of their own souls. [c]

We hear them speak of gods and sons of gods, whom they describe as heroes and good guardian spirits: titles wholly opposed to the truth, honors utterly at odds with the qualities they are meant to exalt. It is as if someone who wanted to point out the sun and the lights of heaven, instead of turning his gaze up toward them, were to grope along the ground with his hands and search for the heavenly powers in the mud and the mire. In just this way humankind, deceived by its own folly and by the cunning of evil spirits, has believed that the divine and spiritual Being, which is far above heaven and earth, could be compatible with the birth, the passions and the death of mortal bodies here below. They went so far in this madness that they sacrificed the dearest objects of their love to their gods. Disregarding every natural tie, and driven by frenzied feeling, they killed their only and best-loved children. [d] For what greater proof of madness can there be than to offer human sacrifice, and to stain every city, and even their own homes, with the blood of their own kin? Do not the Greeks themselves bear witness to this, and is not all history full of records of the same impiety? The Phoenicians offered up their best-loved and only children as a yearly sacrifice to Saturn. The Rhodians, on the sixth day of the month Metageitnion, offered human victims to the same god. At Salamis a man was chased in the temple of Minerva Agraulis and Diomede, made to run three times around the altar, then run through with a spear by the priest and burned whole as an offering on the blazing pyre. In Egypt human sacrifice was most common of all. At Heliopolis three victims were offered every day to Juno, until King Amoses, struck by the horror of the practice, ordered that the same number of wax figures be offered in their place. In Chios, and again in Tenedos, a man was slaughtered and offered up to Omadian Bacchus. At Sparta they sacrificed human beings to Mars. In Crete they did the same, offering human sacrifices to Saturn. At Laodicea in Syria a virgin was killed every year in honor of Minerva; a deer is now offered in her place. The Libyans and the Carthaginians appeased their gods with human victims. The Dumateni of Arabia buried a boy every year beneath the altar. History tells us that the Greeks without exception, and the Thracians and Scythians as well, used to offer human sacrifice before they marched out to battle. The Athenians record the sacrifice of the virgin daughters of Leus, and of the daughter of Erechtheus. And who does not know that even today a human victim is offered in Rome itself at the festival of Jupiter Latiaris? [e] These facts are confirmed by the testimony of the most respected philosophers. Diodorus, who made an abridgment of whole libraries, states that two hundred of the noblest young men were sacrificed to Saturn by the people of Libya, and that three hundred more were offered willingly by their own parents. Dionysius, the compiler of Roman history, says plainly that Jupiter and Apollo demanded human sacrifices from the so-called Aborigines in Italy. He tells how, at this demand, they offered the gods a share of all their produce, but because they refused to kill human victims they were caught up in many disasters. They could find no release from these until they had put a tenth of their own people to death, a sacrifice of life that left their country desolate. Such, and so great, were the evils that afflicted the whole human race in former times. [h]

Nor was this the full extent of their misery. They groaned under the weight of other evils just as many and just as far past remedy. All the nations of the world, civilized and barbarian alike, as though driven by a demonic frenzy, were infected with faction as with some fierce and terrible disease. The human family was divided against itself beyond all reconciling; the great order of society was distracted and torn apart; and in every corner of the earth people stood against one another and fought fiercely over questions of law and government. More than this, with their passions roused to fury, they fought one another so often that their lives were spent, as it were, in unbroken warfare. No one could set out on a journey without being ready to meet an enemy. Even out in the country and the villages the farmers wore swords at their sides and equipped themselves with armor rather than with the tools of farm work, and they counted it a noble feat to plunder and enslave anyone who belonged to a neighboring state. More than this, from the myths they had themselves invented about their own gods they drew excuses for a vile and abandoned life, and they ruined body and soul by every kind of licentiousness. Not content with this, they even overstepped the limits nature had set, and together committed incredible and nameless crimes: “men with men,” in the words of the sacred writer, “committing shameless acts, and receiving in themselves the recompense that was due for their error.” [i]

Nor did they stop even there. They perverted their natural thoughts of God, and denied that the course of this world was directed by his providential care, crediting the existence and the ordering of all things to the blind working of chance or to the necessity of fate. Again, believing that soul and body alike were dissolved by death, they lived a brutish life unworthy of the name. Caring nothing about the nature or the existence of the soul, they had no dread of the judgment seat of divine justice. They expected no reward for virtue, and gave no thought to punishment as the penalty of an evil life. That is why whole nations, a prey to wickedness in all its forms, were wasted by the effects of their own brutality. Some practiced the vilest and most lawless incest with their mothers, others with their sisters, and others again defiled their own daughters. Some murdered the guests who trusted them; others fed on human flesh; some strangled their old men and then feasted on them; others threw them alive to the dogs. Time would fail me if I tried to describe the countless symptoms of the deep-rooted sickness that had made itself master of the whole human race.

These, and countless others like them, were the evils that prevailed. Because of them the gracious Word of God, full of compassion for his human flock, had long before invited those so desperately afflicted to their own cure. He did it through the ministry of his prophets, and earlier still, and later too, through men distinguished by their devotion to God; and by laws, by exhortations, and by teaching of every kind, he proclaimed to humankind the principles and first elements of true godliness. But humankind was being torn apart, as I have said, not by wolves and savage beasts but by ruthless, soul-destroying spirits of evil. Human power was no longer enough; a help greater than human was needed. Then it was that the Word of God, obeying his all-gracious Father’s will, at last appeared himself and most willingly made his home among us. I have already described the reasons for his coming, the reasons that moved him to stoop to human company. He came not in his usual form and manner, for he is bodiless and present everywhere throughout the world, and by his working in heaven and on earth he shows the greatness of his almighty power. He came in a character new and never known before. Taking a mortal body, he consented to live and talk among men, wanting to save our mortal race by means of a likeness of their own.